1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the implementation of wireless local area networks, and in particular to integrating a wireless local area network and a cellular distributed antenna system.
2. Description of Related Art
Most of the offices in a high rise building already have wired local area networks (LAN) for their day-to-day activities. The recent trend for many offices is to provide wireless connections for PCs, Laptops and other computing devices. The wireless connections provide the users with greater mobility both within and outside the office. This greater mobility is partly being achieved at present by using wireless LAN (WLAN) access points and WLAN cards installed in the PC/Laptops.
In order to provide sufficient WLAN coverage in an office, usually one needs to install two or more access points because of line of sight (LOS) constraints. That is to say, two or more wireless access points are needed because the PC/Laptop needs to have a direct, unobstructed path to a wireless access point. The amount of capacity needed by most offices, however, can be satisfied with one wireless access point. The installation of an excess number of access points, i.e., capacity, may result in unnecessary investment costs for the sake of coverage. It would be more cost efficient and practical if one had the means of reducing the large capital investment and the time to conduct a thorough radio propagation study and time for the WLAN access point installation on every floor in the building.